Hanna Neumann

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Hanna Neumann

Johanna "Hanna" Neumann (born von Caemmerer ; born February 12, 1914 in Lankwitz near Berlin , † November 14, 1971 in Ottawa ) was a German- Australian mathematician who dealt with group theory.

Live and act

Hanna von Caemmerer's ancestors came from a Huguenot - Prussian officer family, her father Hermann Konrad von Caemmerer was a historian, but who died in the First World War in 1914 . She attended the girls' secondary school in Berlin and studied from 1932 at the University of Berlin a. a. with Erhard Schmidt , Ludwig Bieberbach , Issai Schur , Walter Nernst . It was there that she met her future husband, Bernhard Neumann (married in 1938, after they were secretly engaged in London in 1934 ), who, as a Jew , had to flee Germany. In 1936 she passed her state examination and began a doctoral degree in Helmut Hasse's group in Göttingen (who based her on the Riemann hypothesis in functional bodies over finite bodies, a problem that André Weil solved in 1940), but then went to her fiancé in England in 1938 where they married and initially lived in Cardiff. She also had five children in England. During the Second World War she began to work on her doctorate in Oxford, which took place in 1944 at Philip Hall ( Subgroup Structure of free products of groups with an amalgamated subgroup ). After the war, Bernard Neumann became a lecturer in Hull, where she also received an assistant position (now she had British citizenship). In 1949, together with her husband and Graham Higman , she proved the HNN embedding theorem for groups (named after the initials of the three authors), from which the term HNN extension , which has been often used in group theory since then, arises. In 1955 she received a D.Sc. for her published work. in Oxford. In 1958 she became a lecturer and shortly thereafter a senior lecturer in Manchester , where her husband was already teaching. 1961/1962 she was at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University (with Bernhard Neumann). In 1963 she moved with her husband to Australia, where she became a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1964 . Here she was particularly involved in teaching. 1968/1969 she was Dean of Students. She died of a brain hemorrhage from an aneurysm while on a lecture tour in Canada .

In addition to group theory, especially group varieties, she also dealt with combinatorics . Her first published work was on selection rules in chess competitions , and in 1954 she published a work on finite geometries (On some finite non-desarguesian planes) .

Her sons Peter Neumann , with whom she also published, Walter Neumann and two other children are also mathematicians. Hanna Neumann was also interested in botany and photography and was a passionate cyclist. An Australian National University building is named after her.

Fonts

  • Higman, Graham; Neumann, BH; Neumann, Hanna: Embedding theorems for groups. J. London Math. Soc. 24: 247-254 (1949).
  • Varieties of Groups. Springer, Results of Mathematics and its Frontier Areas, Berlin 1967.
  • Selected works of Bernhard and Hanna Neumann. Winnipeg 1988.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ At first she worked under Olga Taussky-Todd , who taught in London and Oxford .
personal data
SURNAME Neumann, Hanna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Neumann, Johanna (full name); Caemmerer, Johanna von (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Australian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH February 12, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Lankwitz , Berlin
DATE OF DEATH November 14, 1971
Place of death Ottawa